More than Monkees business

At 40th anniversary, band deserves credit for music it made

At 40th anniversary, band deserves credit for music it made

September 15, 2006|ANDREW S. HUGHES Tribune Staff Writer

The first three albums I bought were by The Monkees -- "The Monkees," "More of the Monkees" and "Headquarters." I was 9 years old and found them all at the same garage sale, for 50 cents each. The Monkees aren't my favorite band, but they were my first, the one that got me hooked on pop and rock music. Moreover, 30 years later, their records remain a source of pleasure and reason for critical thought. Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the debut of the television series "The Monkees," but the band remains a target of critical derision and dismissal because of its origin as characters invented for a television series. They were the first pop band to use a Moog synthesizer, however, and Michael Nesmith's Monkees songs and productions contributed to the creation of country-rock as a genre. Eventually, The Monkees wrote their own songs, played their own instruments and toured as a credible rock band. In addition to a fair biography about The Monkees, the respected "All Music Guide," however, says of the band's music, "It would be foolish to pretend, however, that they were a band of serious significance, despite the occasional genuinely serious artistic aspirations of its members." Rolling Stone has even less to say on its Web site: nothing, not even a biography. As Eric Lefcowitz points out in "The Monkees Tale," however, there were two "Monkees" -- the characters on the television show and the musical quartet made up of the real-life Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The television show always has fared better with critics. John Lennon was a fan, comparing its humor to that of the Marx Brothers, and the series won two Emmy Awards in its first season, for outstanding comedy series and for directing in a comedy series. "The Monkees," however, was marketed as a children's show (worked on me when I found the show in syndication in the '70s), but its humor and visual techniques often broke ground for the medium. "The Monkees" broke the fourth wall and allowed characters to address the audience directly, for example, and most pop culture historians credit the show with inventing the music video in its weekly "musical romps" -- short films set to a Monkees' song. Thematically, the show's humor provided teenagers and adults with substantial political and social commentary. The plots, for instance, regularly put The Monkees in the position of defending what was right, which usually pitted them against authority. This subversive perspective carried over into The Monkees' music and was present from the beginning: On "(Theme From) The Monkees," Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart write, "We're the young generation, and we've got something to say." The Monkees' song choices and original material would back that up time and again, and it's that element of their music that interests me most today. A year before The Beatles told the world "All You Need Is Love," Tork co-wrote "For Pete's Sake," a hippie anthem with the same message. The song became the closing theme for the television show during the second season and perfectly encapsulated The Monkees' pro-youth point of view: "In this generation, in this lovin' time, in this generation, we will make the world shine." Despite such optimism, however, The Monkees also acknowledged the confusion that social change wreaks, with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil's "Shades of Gray": "I remember when the answers seemed so clear. We had never lived with doubt or tasted fear." Tork's plaintive delivery of the final line of the chorus, "Only shades of gray," vividly captures the song's sense of uncertainty teetering on despair. Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Pleasant Valley Sunday" kicks off with a classic guitar riff and then deconstructs the malaise of "life" in "status symbol land" -- the suburbs: "Rows of houses that are all the same, and no one seems to care. ... Creature comfort goals, they only numb my soul and make it hard for me to see." (Personal historical note: Goffin and King wrote the song after a Sunday drive along one of the main roads, Pleasant Valley Way, in my hometown, West Orange, N.J., which was a much better place to grow up than how they portray it, and, frankly, the song is more relevant in today's world of look-alike suburban sprawl subdivisions than it was in 1967.) In concert, The Monkees encountered the sort of adulation and screaming that The Beatles experienced, and with "Star Collector," they cut celebrity worship to pieces by exposing how "young celebrities" view their groupies: "How can I love her when I just don't respect her? ... It won't take much time before I get her off my mind." In other self-referential songs, The Monkees agitated in favor of themselves on Nesmith's "Listen to the Band," but also satirized themselves on "Ditty Diego -- War Chant," from the "Head" soundtrack: "You say we're manufactured. To that, we all agree. ... Hey, hey we are The Monkees. We've said it all before. The money's in, we're made of tin. We're here to give you more." "The Door Into Summer" delivers a double whammy, one against war profiteering and one against avarice in general: King Midas sits "in his counting house where nothing counts but more," counting the "fool's gold" he's made from "a killing in the market on the war." Outside his window, "the echo of a penny whistle band" forces him to realize "he pays for every year he cannot buy back with his tears." On the television show and on their records, The Monkees made several oblique and direct references to the war in Vietnam. Throughout the television series, for example, Tork's character advocated pacifism with lines that appear in hindsight aimed at the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Although some confusion exists over what Boyce and Hart knew when they wrote "Last Train to Clarksville," they intended it as an anti-war song. One account says Clarksdale was the original name of the town, but the two songwriters changed it to Clarksville before they recorded it. Later, they learned Clarksville, Tenn., is home to Fort Campbell, an Army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam. Even with that bit of serendipity on their side, the key line in Boyce and Hart's song addresses the anxiety of soon-to-be-deployed soldiers: "And I don't know if I'm ever coming home." On Dolenz's "Randy Scouse Git," the narrator adopts the voice of authority and sings, "Why don't you hate who I hate, kill who I kill to be free?" The Monkees' most strident socially conscious song, however, is Dolenz's "Mommy and Daddy," where the writer and singer lets loose with a series of questions he wants his preteen listeners to ask their parents: "Ask your mommy why everybody swallows all those little pills. Ask your daddy why that soldier doesn't care who he kills. ... Do you think I'm too young to know, to see, to feel, or hear? My questions need an answer, or a vacuum will appear." It's about as far from bubble gum as you can get, and that's the tame, released version. By then, however, no one was listening. After the television show was canceled in 1968 and left the air that September, The Monkees never hit the top 10 again and their records sold fewer and fewer copies. A shame, because The Monkees did in fact have something to say, and they still do. Go ahead, listen to the band.